It seems everyone has a different opinion on this one and for those that have invested a lot of time and effort setting up their sipsorcery accounts there's probably bit of apprehension as to whether accounts could end up with an ongoing cost or alternatively whether it will all go to waste if the service was to disappear. I've said in the past that the intention was always to keep the basic mysipswitch/sipsorcery service free and up until a month ago that is exactly what occurred for three years. At that point the intent of keeping the service free came into conflict with keeping the service usable, the sipsorcery server was not probably a week away from becoming severely CPU impaired. As I pointed out on my blog at the time new accounts had to be halted so that the service could remain useful to existing users.

That's the situation and is pretty clear cut, to my mind at least . The remedy seems to be a bit more contentious although interestingly it's existing sipsorcery users with free accounts that seem to be most unhappy about the eBay auction approach whereas I haven't had any negative feedback from anyone who has participated in an auction. Anyway the solutions that have occurred to me are:

1. Purchase some more server capacity for sipsorcery by forking out another $2,000 on my credit card and hoping that donations would eventually pay it back (highly unlikely given that only about half the $2,000 for the original server has been donated to date). Plus there would then be the issue of what happened in a year's time when another $4,000 would need to be found to keep the service running,

2. Implement a flat rate subscription charge for all sipsorcery accounts in same as voxalot. While it's probably the most sensible option I don't like it: first it would mean the original commitment to keep the basic service free would be broken (while it wasn't exactly a signed in blood promise and I wouldn't say I'd never break it if it was the last resort I'm very keen to stick to it); second by taking money from people on an ongoing basis you are providing a service and a service has to have support. I definitely don't want to commit to a formal technical support arrangement. I'm happy helping out on the forums, as are quite a few others, but it's a whole different kettle of fish when people expect you solve to their problem solved instantly. One only needs to look at the angst on the voxalot forums to see how unhappy a yearly service fee with no formal support arrangement makes people,

3. Use the eBay auctions to allow a trickle of new users onto the existing system as load permits and at some point it may be possible to purchase more server capacity with the proceeds. It has the potential to be a pyramid scheme with new users paying to keep the service running for existing users and if the new ones ever dried up it would potentially mean a server would need to be shutdown,

4. Come up with some sipsorcery based applications that could be sold as a service with an ongoing monthly fee. Part of the fee would be used to pay for the underlying infrastructure and the free sipsorcery service would act as a sales and marketing front for the paid applications. The switchboard is the first attempt at this but needs more work and of late I have found my time more restricted,

5. LHM's idea of a one off "entrance" fee of $35 on existing users to keep their accounts. This option would probably result in the cost of the service being more than covered but on the flip side it would go against the commitment to keeping the serivce free and also The Fug does have a point when he writes that quite a few people did put in fair bit of time testing the service, beta testers as he calls them, to help make it what it is today,

6. Some other clever idea ???

Option 4 has always been the ideal but is yet to manifest. Until it does option 3 seems like a good stop gap measure, although it's hard to say how long it would be needed for.

All accounts established prior to July 25, 2010 will expire in 30 days.
To maintain your existing a account a one time membership fee of $35.00 is required prior to the expiration date.
Those who made donations prior to 25 July 2010 will be credited the appropriate amount towards their membership fee.

Problem solved.

This will ensure you no payments in the future ? for free phone calls, like those with Google Voice ? which is a trendsetting item on Sipsorcery....
guess nothing is for free....... only

A monthly or yearly fee, is something you can decide for, but i guess only the (few) people who like to code, or program, would like to pay for that.
Lots of people want a service that's easy to use, and for free, a reasonable yearly fee would attract these people also, i guess.
Otherwise keep some of the functions for free, and let people pay for functions they want extra ? Sipsorcery can be adictive
[edit]
Sorry, i now see i also talk about option 4, i guess..... the way MySipswitch was at the start, really was enough for me, (managing multiple providers)
I guess Voxalot does it also like that, and maybe only few people want the extra paid functions, the paid functions should have a short learning curve > easy GUI, or free trial period (fraud free)

option 4 has my vote.

For the people who code & program and post on a regular basis in the forum, should have a no limits account ? their payment is the effort they spent on Sipsorcery ? should be enough

Hi All,
I have a suggestion, now a days everyone's conputer is always online, and with where technology is today, creating Web Services is becoming easier than ever, why not think of a DISTRIBUTED sipsorcery and allow people to donate their computing cycles for sipsorcery to harvest and most of your issues will be solved. allow people to host files on their computer to help with all of these cpu related computations. is that something that can be done or is it dificult to manage?

it may even help with the quality to the calls as well.
imaging sipsorcery detecting the registered ATA IP and route all of their related computation to a near by node. kind of like pushing all of cpu hoging calculations to that computer...and let sipsorcery handle only the neccessary stuff.

I don't come around the forum too often unless I'm having a problem. If a fee is implemented would you be able to email all current subscribers to inform them? I would have no problem with a one-time or recurring fee, as long as the charge is reasonable. But I would hate to see my account closed purely because I did not know a new fee had been implemented.

Another option would be to email all users and request donations. The only way I found out about the request for donation was earlier this year when Amazon's servers were give you problems. It was only then that I saw the situation and donated, but if I had not come to the site I would have not known about the request for donations nor the problems admin was having and the cost for an effective solution. Of course there is a worry that too many email requests could look a bit like spam but if the emails were sent our annually, bi-annually or even quarterly no one could take issue.

I think ebaying the new accounts is also a great idea, but if it's still causing you to be out of pocket then other solutions should be considered.

jay75 wrote:Hi All,
I have a suggestion, now a days everyone's conputer is always online, and with where technology is today, creating Web Services is becoming easier than ever, why not think of a DISTRIBUTED sipsorcery and allow people to donate their computing cycles for sipsorcery to harvest and most of your issues will be solved. allow people to host files on their computer to help with all of these cpu related computations. is that something that can be done or is it dificult to manage?

it may even help with the quality to the calls as well.
imaging sipsorcery detecting the registered ATA IP and route all of their related computation to a near by node. kind of like pushing all of cpu hoging calculations to that computer...and let sipsorcery handle only the neccessary stuff.

I would also agree with this, I already run BOINC without any loss in performance of my PC, I never shut my computer off so I would also be very happy to help in this way to take the load off the main server. If this can be done, buying another server will not be needed, because you effectively have built enough cpu processors to handle future expansions and accounts. You could make it part of the account setup. Currently you can have any sip client be used with sip sorcery. This means that any ATA, Softphone, or SIP client for mobile can be used. This is wonderful in the sense that if things work out, and the switchboard can also utilized (I know its still in developent), then you have effectively created the Perfect PBX system. Imagine a family with one telephone number, can make outgoing calls, get in comming calls, and call a extension to reach any part of their home, or cellphone or computer. This is also perfect for offices, provided in some way that voicemail can be achieve on said extension.

I will be happy to donate time, and processing power as needed to keep accounts free, and for innovation to keep going. My suggestion is to develop a distributed app.

aaron, this story of migration is bullshit, you first delete my account then you said "there is no mysipswitch account in your name" that's the dirtiest way to act, you had more credit from everybody saying "ok now the whole service will be paid" without mounting that stupid story of migration for all the old mysipswitch users, thank you very much for having caused me a nice pile of issues.